The Cure objected to being called goth. But that’s exactly what Robert Smith, Michael Dempsey and I were as we searched for meaning in the malaise around us
Consider the songs from what many of our most diehard fans regard as our three early dark albums, our “goth phase”, if you will: Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. They remain the foundation for not just a new kind of music but a way of being in the world. The only thing we lacked was a name for it, but that came soon enough. My investigation into this led me to understand the subculture in a deeper way.
Paradoxically, goth is often portrayed in a comical way by the media. It probably needs to be so to make it overtly two-dimensional and easily digestible for those who will never comprehend it. As with punk before it, if you can identify the main components, then you can precis the understanding of what it is.
As a young punk on the outskirts of London, I also understood it to be many other things: a credo, a posture, a two-minute manifesto I could wave in the face of my fear to banish uncertainty and despair, and to give me hope in a dark and diminished Britain. Our detractors never understood that, but the dark-haired boys and girls did. The Raven knew it deep in her bones. That otherworldly beauty made sure we never forgot it.
Descartes’s famous phrase – Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am – has led western man to equate his identity with his mind, instead of with his whole organism. I think we can equate the origins of goth, and its close cousin post-punk, with the quest to find what’s beyond the Cartesian mode of thought. If punk was pure, instinctual nihilism, goth searched for meaning – even if we didn’t quite realise it back then. Its sources varied. They were not always music.